The UC San Diego electrical engineers and computer scientists used the Backstreet Boys to highlight the subjective nature of music. This subjectivity makes it tricky to teach a computer to label songs with words. Should the computer label a Backstreet Boys song as if it were a pre-teen girl? or a dj at an indie radio station? If you want to find out, check out the paper. It is one of three papers the UCSD group is presenting at a music information retrieval conference (ACM ISMIR) this week in Vienna.

Beyond the Backstreet Boys, the researchers are working on a music search engine that lets you type in words and get acutal songs in return. One of the main things they are reporting at the conference in Vienna is that their online game (it's called Listen Game) is good for collecting data that they need to train their computer system to automatically label songs (with no input from humans, except for the initial training.) Read the full press release here.

They are now working on new versions of the games. The original version, Listen Game, works well, but, as the authors told me, "it was made my a bunch of engineers." (Read: it looks like an old-school video game and it doesn't exactly measure up to today's coolest online games.)